Hi there, Dear Reader. It’s late morning here in New Hometown, Florida on Monday, May 3, 2021. It’s going to be a hot beginning to the workweek. Right now, the temperature is 83˚F (28˚C) under sunny skies. With humidity at 73% and the wind blowing from the south-southeast at 10 MPH (16 KM/H), the heat index is 84˚F (29˚C). The forecast calls for light rain and a high of 91˚F (33˚C), while tonight, the skies will be clear. The low will be 72˚F (22˚C).
Well, I’m still a bit…out of sorts about having to buy a new laptop this month. Not just because it was an unexpected expense, but also because I won’t be able to access my old Epinions reviews and Writer’s Corner stuff that I had archived when eBay closed that review site seven years ago. That, and the fact that there are probably drafts of stories and screenplays that I was working on during my mother’s illness.
(Plus, as sentimental as I am, I will miss the wallpaper on that computer’s startup screen – an underwater photograph of a sea turtle swimming in the depths of the Pacific Ocean. By sheer coincidence, my mother had a wildlife calendar that one of the many charities she supported sent her for 2009, and the photo for the month in which my laptop arrived was one of the illustrations available to use in my laptop’s Windows themes.)
Unlike my other computers, I never changed the wallpaper on my old laptop, and I considered it to be one of the last links I had to my previous life in Miami.
Plus, seriously. $687.98 is a hefty price for a guy on a fixed income. And especially if I have to spread the payments out rather than pay the entire amount at once. I hate having to do that.
On the brighter side of things, though, the new laptop will be more modern and will run on Windows 10, whereas my now defunct Compaq was still running on Windows Vista Home, an operating system that Microsoft stopped supporting not too long ago. And it will have touch screen functionality, a feature that I have never seen in person, much less used. (Nevertheless, I still ordered a Logitech – MX Anywhere 2S Wireless Laser Mouse, since I find touchpads to be fine for some programs but useless for others.)
If it wasn’t for the laptop purchase, May 2021 might have been a less expensive month, since I only planned on getting my pre-order of Hemingway: A Film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick and a hardcover edition of Harold Coyle’s revised and expanded version of Team Yankee: A Novel of World War III. I have most of Coyle’s novels in hardcover, but I only have a battered and much read paperback edition of Team Yankee that I bought at the bookstore in what was then called Miami-Dade Community College, South Campus back in 1988 or so.
And even though I can watch Hemingway on my Samsung 4K UHD TV’s PBS app, I still need the Blu-ray because it comes with English subtitles for the deaf or hearing impaired (SDH). I’m not deaf, at least not yet, but I am hard of hearing, and since my room is located between two other people’s bedrooms, I can’t play non-captioned TV shows or movies with the volume turned way up. I just can’t. It’s inconsiderate, and even though sometimes I feel unhappy here and wish I could move to a place of my own, I refuse to give in to selfishness and play my TV or even my PC with the audio on high volume. (And at least with the PC I can always use a headset.)
According to Amazon, my package with Hemingway and Team Yankee will arrive tomorrow. Amazon is using its own delivery service this time instead of Louis DeJoy’s badly hobbled U.S. Postal Service, so I know I’ll be getting it tomorrow.
Well, it’s almost noon here now, so I’ll close this post here. Until next time, then, Dear Reader, take care, stay safe, stay healthy, and I’ll catch you on the sunny side of things.
A Certain Point of View, Too 
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